The Lovers
By Safia Elhillo
khartoum in the eighties,
my mother with ribbons in her hair
dress fanning about her nutmeg calves
my father
(who i hear
was so lively and handsome
that only bad magic could have emptied that
and filled him with smoke)
the borrowed record player
the generation that would leave
to make nostalgia of these very nights
to hyphenate their children
and grow gnarled by diaspora’s
every winter
but tonight, motown crackling
into the hot twilight,
mosquitoes swaying
in the velvet dusk,
my parents dance
without ever touching.
☀☀☀☀☀
This poem originally appeared in volume 10 of Vinyl Poetry and is reprinted with permission
Safia Elhillo’s first full-length collection is The January Children (Nebraska, 2017). A Cave Canem fellow, she received a BA from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and an MFA in poetry at The New School. Elhillo is a Pushcart Prize nominee, co-winner of the 2015 Brunel University African Poetry Prize and winner of the 2016 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. Her work appears in The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (Haymarket, 2015) and has been translated into Arabic and Greek.